Managing Director Lagarde has positioned the IMF as an important and credible voice in the debate about climate change. Now it’s time for the Fund to expand and institutionalize this new role, helping poor and vulnerable countries understand and confront the macroeconomic and financial risks of climate change.
WASHINGTON DC, Oct 11 2017 (IPS) - The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and climate change do not often appear in the same headline together. Indeed, environmental issues have been, at most, peripheral to the Fund’s core functions. But now economists inside and outside the IMF are beginning to understand that climate change has significant implications for national and regional economies, and so it’s worth reconsidering the Fund’s role in addressing the climate challenge.
For the 180th time, Sheldon Whitehouse took to the Senate floor this month to warn of the perils of climate change, blasting the fossil fuel industry, corporate greed and the failure of market capitalism to address global warming.
“I think a lot about electric cars,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk famously said at a party at the very end of the 80s. “Do you think a lot about electric cars?” The problem with thinking a lot about electric cars is that certain things become impossible to unthink: powering a car with fossil fuels, meeting 21st-century challenges with 19th-century answers, become more than irresponsible. It becomes ridiculous.
It's March. Southern Co. CEO Tom Fanning is sitting in a hotel lounge in downtown Houston talking energy policy, President Trump and what's wrong with U.S. power markets.
I’m sitting at the bottom of my garden, reading Paul Kingsnorth’s astonishing new book, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist. It’s too late, he says. There is no way we can reverse the environmental changes that will lead to our destruction. And the very idea of progress, of continual forward momentum, is precisely the engine of our destruction. I start to daydream. My thinking slips sideways. I start puzzling about the Progressive Alliance. What is a progressive? And how are they related to the progress Kingsnorth believes has been destroying our planet?
In his new book, “Captured: The Corporate Infiltration of American Democracy,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, rails against the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which opened up a floodgate of corporate political contributions, much of it in the form of “dark money” whose origins do not have to be disclosed.
The role of governor of a progressive West Coast state has taken on a somewhat different resonance since Jay Inslee was first elected in 2012. Comfortably reelected in 2016, he now finds himself part of a symbolic rebellion against the Trump Empire. (Sorry, just watched the Star Wars trailer.)
Ecosystems are self-regulating systems that provide societies with food, water, timber, and other resources. As demands for resources increase, management decisions are replacing self-regulating properties. Counter to previous technical approaches that applied simple formulas to estimate sustainable yields of single species, current research recognizes the inherent complexity of ecosystems and the inability to foresee all consequences of interventions across different spatial, temporal, and administrative scales. Ecosystem management is thus more realistically seen as a “wicked problem” that has no clear-cut solution. Approaches for addressing such problems include multisector decision-making, institutions that enable management to span across administrative boundaries, adaptive management, markets that incorporate natural capital, and collaborative processes to engage diverse stakeholders and address inequalities. Ecosystem management must avoid two traps: falsely assuming a tame solution and inaction from overwhelming complexity. An incremental approach can help to avoid these traps.
EHN is teaming up with The George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health to bring you the voices of next generation environmental health leaders
Coronavirus is going to batter us far longer than the worst of hurricanes. We must not let environmental justice communities be flattened in the process.
